lockdown : vinyl find #2.

A few years ago, I was regularly going to flea markets/garage sales. I was living in a rural area about 70km north of Paris, France, and this seemed to be one of the few occasions for me to mix in with a crowd. I have never been the kind of digger that would wake up very early with the obsessive goal of browsing first in the trunk of an old car with my headlamp tightly nailed to my forehead. 

I was eagerly waiting for the weekends, and after a few months of practice, I knew how to discriminate between the interesting flea markets and the dull ones. Sometimes, I had a schedule, expecting to visit several markets within the same day. As a matter of fact, such markets happen within a short period of time, say between April and October. 

Some markets were glorious, with a lot of people selling the records which used to collect dust in the attic. Some were completely without records. Most of the time, one could study, just by looking into the crates, the obvious bad taste which was a common thing in France back in the days. 

And sometimes, very rare thing, a gem would pop out. I quickly learned how to spot the families that would have interesting records, sometimes just one, sometimes a whole crate. The whole-crate situation could appear to be problematic as I would not carry a lot of cash with me. 

Back in 2013, I found this record in a rural town, Crépy-en-Valois, which happened to be one of the first clusters of Covid19 in France. It was sitting in a crate with almost nothing else interesting. As an admirer of Cesaria Evora, and facing the impossibility to get my hand on a decently priced record by the goddess, I had developped a taste for other Cap Verdian artists. After all, the recipe was close : bright guitars, mellow melodies, sweetness all along, saudade and funana. I'd heard the name Abel Lima before. I knew French producers had been instrumental in bringing Cap Verdian artists to the world stage. 

And this record popped out : not a beautiful cover per se, with a bit of French text on the front, and Portuguese liner notes on the back... it didn't make sense. Which made it worth of interest. Once again, the price (again 3€) would help me to decide : I had to own it. 

I was not disappointed. The record, the first from Abel Lima according to Discogs, is everything you would expect from a Cap Verdian artist. Add to what I already said before nice basslines provided by Bernard Brito, and you get a major record, very peaceful. The perfect record for the lockdown. 

Abel Lima e Les Sofas - Nos Bida. 

And here is the album in full : YouTube.

Plus, this is one of those lucky finds that you get for almost nothing but appear to be worth several hundreds of euros. But it is not the point.